Breaking Energy has been focusing on the energy-water nexus today in our coverage in recognition of UN World Water Day, which occurred this past Saturday. The infographic helps visualize the volumes of water used to generate electricity from various sources. In addition to power generation, water is used to produce oil, gas, coal, biofuels and most raw energy-related commodities.

Jared Anderson, Managing Editor at Breaking Energy, covered international oil and natural gas market fundamentals as an Analyst then Senior Analyst in the Research & Advisory division at Energy Intelligence Group. Earlier in his career, Jared spent several years working in the environmental consulting industry. He holds a Master's degree in international relations with a focus on energy from ...

Is it my computer, or is there really just one paragraph? The way to "save" water is via nuclear energy. Otherwise, the world continues down the path of global warming and the biosphere dies... anyways.

Jared, Why did you leave hydro out of your story? It is one of our best and biggest sources of reliable dispatchable low emission renewable kWh's, the other being nuclear. They each produce about 19% of all our electricity, far greater than wind and solar. And unreliable undispatchable kwhs are really worth only a fraction of what reliable dispatchable kwhs are worth.

Could it be because hydro consumes 18 gallons per kWh due to evaporation? See table 2.

If we went 100% nuclear and restored our rivers to natural condition, we could reduce water consumption for electricity production over 90%.

Jared, leaving this information about hydro out is not fair and balanced, and makes me curious about your motivation, what is it?

PS Check your graphic, 600 gallons will fill a small backyard pool, not an olympic pool.

A few things about C Lusvardi's comments. Everyone who has studied biology can tell you that there a magnitudes more insects than fish larvae. We have a much greater need to protect fisheries than insects. Yes there may be 130 billion insects in 4000 acres but then that assumes ALL of them will get fried. Furthermore, if we were to extrapolate the 4,000 acres or 6.25 square miles to the area of let us say the Mohave Deset, which is about 54,000 square miles, the loss of insects in 0.011% of that area is pretty negligible.BTW, the comples actually sits on 3500 acres, not 4000 acres. So we're talking 0.0102%. Tiny.

The latest Californai CSE project, 392-MW Ivanpah project is mostly air-cooled and uses 90% less water than a conventional coal plant. The used water is made available for cleaning mirrors. Comparing to Geothermal instead of coal or nuclear? Why? What's the reason for comparing to Geothermal? Because it fits your narrative. Geothermal uses 5 gallons/MWh of freshwater, compared to 361 gallons/MWh at a natural gas plant. The current unit 1 in the Mohave uses as much water as watering 2 holes fo a golf couse each day.

"dry cooling can not be used in temperatures over 100 degrees F," That's news to a few people including the owners of a numer of power plants in the Southwest.

Dry cooling is not limited by a 100 oF desert temperature. It does work in the desert, althought there are additional costs to efficiency.

"Some plants located in such an environment have learned to live with the situation. For example, dry-cooled power plants are located in Nevada, parts of Texas and Northern Mexico, in areas without access to water supplies for a cooling system.

On a 110 oF day, these plants accept an energy production penalty of approximately five percent overall (including turbine and steam cycles), compared to a plant equipped with a wet-cooling system."

Your implicaiton that ocean cooled thermal plants predominate California's energy mix is news to us in California. Power plants are everywhere. An excellent map can be found here.

Not quite. Solar thermal uses molten salts and the heat stored is released over a longer period of time than the sun is up. In Arizona one pplant has enough storage capacity to operate for 6 hours after sunset, which covers peak consumption. Within 5 years there will be numerous MWH scale batteries at renewable sites, several of which are already under construction in California this year, that renders this intermittent argument moot. Really moot by 2020 when 20 billion worth of storage will be installed around the country. BTW, I like the idiotic talk about solar being around for 60 years. Wrong. Been around for more than 100 years. Then again we had coal for thousands of years before we turned it into electricity. One of the dumber anti renewable energy arguments around.

The author gives no frame of reference, making it sound as if this is a huge fraction of our water consumption. If all our electricity came from nuclear plants with wet cooling towers (worst case), their water consumption would only be 2 to 3% of total water consumption.

The biggest use is food production. It takes about 1,000 gallons to grow and process 1 gallon of corn ethanol. Buy 20 gallons of E-85 and you just consumed a semi tanker truckload of water.

High temperature reactors like MSR or HTGR can get higher thermodynamic efficiency than convnetional reactors, even with dry cooling, though efficiency is not very important given the low cost of uranium per kWh.

Nevertheless, even if uranium were free, it would be a good idea simply for economic reasons to have high efficiency.

An approach I've been thinking quite a bit would involve very high temperature reactors - higher than is currently accessible from FLIBE type MSR's or even AHTGR - to run either metal based hydrogen cycles with or without carbon dioxide reduction to produce syn gas with first round cooling in a system much like a combined cycle gas plant with a Brayton cycle followed by a Rankine cycle. (Under the right conditions, syn gas reduces exothermically.)

I've been digging through some very old literature in the last several months, back in the days when nuclear creativity flourished, and have discovered many types of reactor experiments that were quite interesting but were abandoned, some because the knowledge of materials science was quite primitive then. Nevertheless, fundemental discoveries were made that might well be dusted off and re-examined.

One might even imagine a system that is almost heat pump like, where heat is carried long distances with an appropriate supercritical gas, and pumped out to do space heating.

Under the right conditions, with an appropriate mix of breeding technologies and stocks of both thorium and depleted uranium, we might not need energy related mining of any type for several centuries.

This all sounds idealistic, and maybe it is, but I have convinced myself it is possible, if not easy, to do.

"One might even imagine a system that is almost heat pump like, where heat is carried long distances with an appropriate supercritical gas, and pumped out to do space heating."

No need for supercritical gases. Water does the job just fine in Switzerland, Hungary, Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria. Here in Finland, there has also been some thinking about converting Helsinki's highly efficient but, sadly, largely coal-fired CHP system to run on nuclear. In the early 1980s, simple reactors of the SECURE type were even proposed just for heating purposes. See here:

According to various analysis, that would be the fastest and most efficient method for turning our capital into a virtually zero-carbon city (excluding transport, naturally). Of course, it's also the most heavily opposed one. Now we're experimenting with biofuels, with no regard to the big picture - e.g. Helsinki would consume most of the available, low-emission biofuel in the entire Finland.

Using water is not the same as using it up. After a power plant has USED water, the same water is returned to the environment. It may be in a different state (water or vapour) and has higher temperature, but is, in other words unchanged. We can agree that we should also use that higher temperature water for heating in which case, the water returned would be no different than when it entered the power plant.

Also, to be fair you must also consider that PV panels require to be clean for optimal performance. This means that they need to be cleaned - with water. So your claim of 0 water use for maintenance of solar cells is false.

While I very much support use of solar as part of the mix for our energy supply, at present, and for a foreseable future, PV will be mainly useful for recharging our iPhones and powering devices while camping. Yes, I know that there are many houses equipped with PV roof panels and they can produce several kW of power on a sunny, summer day, however, when I come home in the evening, I prefer to know that the base load is provided by a reliable source of electricity, preferably generated from the power of a river or by a nuclear reactor.

Much of that same water evaporates into the atmosphere with the rest needing to be diluted with cooler water for environmental reasons so in esseence water is used up. Amount of water used for PV cleaning is pretty minimal/kwh.

10 years from now, some of your night time power will be coming from large energy storage systems. Some of those will get power from solar and wind, while others may be getting the surplus from nuclear or fossil baseload plants.

I guess what this shows is that solar enthousiasts are so convinced that they are ready to present any amount of misinformation.

Nuke plants can use dry coolers (zero water consumption), and they do, wherever there is a need for cheap power and not enough water available.

Water cooling is cheaper than air cooling, which is the only reason nukes (and coal and gas CCGT plants for that matter) use water rather than not.

The amount of water used by a thermal power plant is the amount of water evaporated. That's not much at all. Most of the water is not evaporated but simply returned to the river, lake or ocean it is taken from after taking some of the waste heat. But the author of this 'info' graphic will count all the water, rather than only what was evaporated.

Besides, water usage is not generally a significant environmental issue for power generation. Wherever it is a significant issue, air cooling will do the job as well.

Finally, I note that I prefer the heat from thermal power plants is put to use rather than wasted. Combined heat and power plants can (and do) deliver their heat to district heating, rather than just blow it off in water-cooled or dry cooled towers. Coal, nuclear and gas power plants are all able to provide heat and electricity simultaneously, to serve the needs of people and businesses. Of these three types of generation, nuclear is superior in every way, but the public is being kept in the dark about this great boon to society. If the public should ever understand and covet the societal benefit of using nuclear power, the energy industry would be shocked to its core and a great many vested interests would suffer.

"Nuke plants can use dry coolers (zero water consumption), and they do, wherever there is a need for cheap power and not enough water available."

I would think that if there's not enough water available for a nuclear plant, the safety requierement for a possible melt down would not be able to be fulfilled, creating a possible safety and severe health hazard for the surrounding area.

So how many nuclear plants do use 'dry' coolers anyways?

In addition, I also think the graphic is not correct, but those in favour of nuclear power never talk about the limited resource (and how much energy you need to find it and prepare it for use) and then the nuclear waste, where do you leave that, in your backyard? What energy do you need to store the waste?

I think solar and wind and hydro bit by bit will be cheaper and cheaper, with regard to solar, yes the panels they requiere some water to clean, but if it rains once a while there's not much cleaning to do actually. And, from experience, normal dust is easy to wipe off without using water. I think the water used to clean panels is very little compared to what is needed to run fossil fuel plants.

I guess trying to compare water use isn't going to get us anywhere. What we simply need to follow is leave the fossil fuels in the ground, and focus on solely clean energy sources, and energy efficiency. That is energy spent for a good cause and benefits all of us and wll keep the planet from heating up more and more.

In California nuke plants have had to be located next to the ocean or a major river course for a source of cooling water. New California water laws ban using oceanwater for cooling any power plant along the coastline. But the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant co-owned by Southern California Edison is located along the Colorado River but uses recycled water.

Dry coolers are expensive.

Readers of this website know that solar and wind power wholesale prices have become competitive with natural gas power plant and hydropower plant prices. But clean power increases the ancillary costs of transmission, grid profiling and regulation, and backup power. So cleap clean power is false advertising when full system costs are not considered (this is called Levelized Cost of Power). Used car dealers have more disclosure requirements about miles per gallon than clean energy providers do about true costs.

Clean power is mostly subsidized power; the extraordinary costs are spread over a large base of customers. I have no problem with policy makers advocating for clean power but they should be held to a standard of avoiding false advertising. Clean power is more appropriate for use in Basin States where there are air basins that create smog traps. Clean power is less appropriate for use in Plains States where the solution to pollution is dilution.

Peter, I agree with you - let's leave fossil fuels in the ground. They store energy collected from the Sun over millions of years and it is not a good idea to release it all within 2-3 centuries (although that is exactly what we are doing). Nevertheless, it would be great to eliminate them as the source for our energy needs.

I also agree with you that we want to find adequate sites to build hydro power plants. Most suitable sites have already been dammed and are now producing clean power. A few more exist. Similarly, I am with you on the further use of renewables.

With all this said, we are left with a deficiency of 60% or more of our present energy needs. Saying "present" is very important as, today, about 2.5 billion people use 80% of energy. The remaining 4.5 billion (and growing) use the remaining 20% and they cannot be deprived of the benefits that electricity offers. Fortunately, many people are being brought out of poverty. This means that even if we (2.5 b) reduce our energy consumption, it is unrealistic to envision that total energy of humanity will go down.

This leaves us with a huge energy generating deficiency and in my opinion, the only rational conclusion is that we must grow the use of nuclear power. Let's address some of the concerns about nuclear.

1. It needs mining. True, and not. USA has been burning fuels (U235, P239 and MoX) that were manufactured from Russian nuclear warheads. Many more of these remain in weapons arsenals around the world so even without mining we are good for fuel for a considerable time. Furthermore, there are new technologies being researched (Thorium reactors in India and China are given high priority), CANDU reactors use plentiful U238, there are some interesting developments in the area of nuclear fusion and so on.

2. It is dangerous, reactors can explode. True, however, we know how to mitigate these dangers. Accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima all happened in reactors based on very old technologies - new reactor designs Gen 3 mitigate such deficiencies and Gen 4 reactors use even more advanced safety mechanisms. Furthermore, reactors that use Molten Salts for cooling work under atmospheric pressure and eliminate some of the dangers of the light water pressurized designs.

3. non-proliferation - creates fuel for nuclear bombs. True but this is mitigated already by exceptional security around reactors, stringent transportation and handling procedures. High standards are set and maintained for anything that relates to radioactive substances. They should be further enhanced and optimized.

4. Terrorist targets - nuclear reactors in USA are built to withstand impact from a Boeing 707 airplane. While there are bigger aircraft in operation today, how realistic is it that a terrorist would be able to access a plane and direct his/her sick mind to a power plant? Furthermore, we can move critical components of future reactors underground and eliminate this threat altogether.

5. Nuclear waste. What is waste today, could be used as fuel tomorrow. New reactor designs can burn depleted uranium (depleted because the percentage of U235 is reduced to 2-3% but this still leaves 90% or more of U238 which is fissile and can burn in fast spectrum reactors) so we could kill two birds with a single technology change - stop mining and recycle stockpiles of depleted nuclear fuel. Also, nuclear waste is already re-processed and used in reactors in France. As you may know, France creates about 80% of its electricity needs from nuclear power, has the lowest price of electricity in Europe and exports it successfully. All French nuclear waste is stored presently in one large facility where it is submerged underwater).

We can go on and on with arguments and counter arguments. I am no expert on nuclear but I consider myself well informed and able to be pragmatic about available choices we, as humans have. We somehow became guardians of The Earth but we seem to be making very poor and selfish choices when it comes to seeing that it remains our home in the future.

If worried about water consumption, then "once-thru" use of river or seawater solves the problem; no water is evaporated for cooling purposes. As long as you don't heatup the entire river, it's a good way to go and the fishing is superb!

I mean, once the Santa Ana winds blow up in California during a massive drought, won't all those thousand of square miles of beautiful cadmium laced solar cells be covered with a layer of dust?

Rather than remark on the theory behind solar energy, which is expensive, toxicologically questionable, and still after 60 years of cheering, still unable to produce just one of the 540 exajoules of energy that humanity consumes annually, wouldn't it be better to produce enough energy to run all the servers telling us how wonderful solar energy is?

Combined with wind energy, it's soaked up more than a trillion bucks between 2004 and 2012.

As in other technologies there's a growth curve. 70 years ago there were no nuclear power plants. So if you want to truly be serious, cut out the nonsensical. Everything takes time. Wasn't long ago when solar and wind and other renewables, excluding large hydro, were negligible contributors to California's daily electrical usage -about 560,000MWH-800,000MWH/day. The contribution from solar and wind is now well above 5%, sometimes exceeds 10% of daily needs. Considering that neither wind or solar in our drought-stricken state consume much water, provide localized energy production to reduce overall grid load, I would say that is wonderful. In December 2012 California had a maximum of about 1GW of solar production. today it's about 4GW. Simple doubling could get us up to 128GW in 5 years. What do you think 70 years, the same time frame as nuclear, will get us?

After sixty years, which form of energy is the world's largest form of climate change gas free energy, nuclear or solar?

Which has saved more lives?

The solar industry can't even produce enough electricity to address the servers dedicated to saying how great it is.

It also can't power all the servers dedicated to making excuses for it's miserable performance, and we haven't even addressed the still swept under the rugh issue of toxicology.

Everything takes time you say...

Right now the atmosphere is scraping over 400 ppm of dangerous fossil fuel waste? How much more time does the failed expensive solar industry need? How many more trillions of dollars does it insist on soaking up - much scraped out of the pockets of poor people - before a RESULT is required?

The solar industry is more than half a century old and has yet to produce one of the 540 exajoules of energy humanity consumes each year - humanity's energy demand is rising each year vastly faster than world solar output - in any year in its history.

This performance is a disgrace, particularly when one considers the resources squandered to pursue this faith based initiative.

Please don’t tell me that I’m not serious when I question this awful result. It would seem to me, given this more than half a century of hearing the big promises of the solar industry, that no serious person can take any of them seriously, and yet, and yet…

Tis a pity no one teaches history anymore. A. E. Becquerel, at age 19, experimenting in his father's laboratory, he built the world's first photovoltaic cell. in 1839. In 1883 Charles Fritts, an American inventor, devloped the first Selenium solar cell, it was 1% efficient. Albert Einstein wrote a paper on the photoelectric effect—in 1905, for which he received the Nobel prize in Physics in 1921.

As for time, I note that solar technology has had to make large improvements and develop the manufacturing infrastructure as which happens in most industries. in 1993 the US generated much of the PV in the world at a level of nearly 900 GWH. In 2011 the entire world output is roughly estimated to be 52, 878GWH or 0.2 exojoules with a peak output of 69,684 MWp. TWO years later that has doubled to 140,000 MWp. No exact figures on total output but safe to assume that doubles as well to about 0.4 exojoules. So in a couple of years you will have your exojoule and if the trend continues in 10 years there will be 3-4 exojoules if not more. That assumes a mere doubling which is an underestimate as California as an example nearly quadrupled its peak solar output in a mere 13 months.

Another item, this misery you seem to dwell upon is a fake. The great thing about solar is the decentralization of energy generation and the ease of which it can improve a billion + lives in short order without the need for expensive generation and distribution infrastructure as well as the concomitant long lead times to implement. In underdeveloped nations, they can take advantage of the latest technologies, small LED lights that are solar powered is already replacing expensive and toxic kerosene lighting in Africa. There is no way you could build out economically a conventional or nuclear power source to reach the hundreds of thousands of villages throughout let us say the Sahel region.

Your rhetoric implies that solar is the only game in town. It is not. It is part of the 6 exojoules of renewable energy that Europe generated last year. It is part of the 20% of electrical generation in California which if it merely doubles every year as production ramps up and drives costs down even further, we will find the Golden State to have the equivalent of current world output in 2019. Powering lots of servers, btw. If you are so concerned about time, then I suggest you push energy conservation in industrialized and developed nations because that is where you can make exojoules of change in world energy use in the shortest amount of time and the least amount of money, as California has so aptly demonstrated over the past 35 years.

Three of four exajoules, you predict hopefully, after the expenditure of trillions of dollars, and still requiring back up with dangerous natural gas plants?

How about another lecture on seriousness?

If you must know, when I was puppy - I'm an old dog now - I bought all this solar wishful thinking quite seriously.

I was, I freely confess, a fool.

I'm an old man now, and I've heard it all before. Rather than burn coal, gas and oil to run servers tell us about the latest solar soothsaying, the same old bull that one hears year after year, decade after decade, about how much energy the solar industry will produce, why not just produce the energy and be done with it?

My oldest son is in college now, and decades before he was born I was hearing these insipid extrapolations about how solar energy was going to take over the world. Amory Lovins was handing out this manure in the 1970's, telling us glibly that we'd be producing 16 exajoules (he used the close unit "quads") of solar energy in the United States by 2000.

I may be wrong about this, but it's 2014, and the entire planet can't produce one such exajoule. And the response is what? More soothsaying?

By the way, you have seriously misconstrued some scientific history. No one, absolutely no one, viewed Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect as a new way of producing energy. The effect was well known but inexplicable with the wave mechanics understood at the time. Einstein's work merely explained the existence of the widely measured work function of metals and offered an explanation for the phenomenon by utilizing Planck's constant in a way that not even Planck imagined it would be used. It was a remarkable theoretical discovery, but did nothing to "discover" the effect.

California, for what it's worth, is yet another dangerous natural gas hellhole with rising carbon dioxide emissions for electricity, the usual handiwork of anti-nukes. Despite trashing huge stretches of formerly pristine land area with solar garbage, the entire state can't produce as much solar energy to match the energy that was once produced continuously and reliably in two small buildings at San Onofre.

In 2012, the entire state, according to California's energy website, produced just 1533 GWh of electricity from solar energy. In terms of average continuous power, this is the equivalent of a 175 megawatt plant, operating at 100% capacity utilization, but solar energy is NOT continuous power and cannot operate without redundancy. It would be useless without dangerous natural gas to back it up, USELESS.

The state produced 121,649 GWh of electricity using dangerous natural gas, dumping all of the waste from this enterprise directly into its favorite waste dump, the planetary atmosphere.

I note that in 2002, the state was producing 855 GWh of solar energy, carrying on with insipid "million solar roof" bills, and hydrogen stations, blah, blah, blah. In a decade, thus historically, the grand solar investment in that State is the equivalent of adding a 77 MW power plant.

How impressive…

By the way, I lived in California in the 1970’s when the "solar thermal" LUZ plants were built, the plants that were going to save the world. Predictably even these plants burn gas now.

If anything, California is a demonstration of how much fantasy and posturing is involved in the solar energy game and how meaningless this expensive toying has proved to be.

Unfortunately, this wishful thinking is doing great damage, precisely because it’s lulling people into a tragic complacency that is rapidly heading the entire planet to disaster.

There are no places on this planet where the solar scam is taken seriously that do not have rising emissions for electricity; zero. That’s the true outcome of the fantasy. And this, with the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste as measured at Mauna Loa this week firmly above 400 ppm, is - there's no other word for it - a disaster.

See here: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/boom_in_mining_rare_earths_poses_mounting_toxic_risks/2614/ for the ecological damnage cause by mining for rare eath elments in Asia, and anywhere else you care to look on the web.

Rare earth processing is a dirty, high energy, high water use business. It is why US based, Molycorp ships the ore they mine in California to China for processing.

Rare earths are required in PV and wind turbines. In fact, over 2000 lbs of rare earths are in each industrial wind tubine, much less in PV, but it is still there.

Moreover, dry cooling can not be used in temperatures over 100 degrees F, which is typical in the Southwestern U.S. in desert areas with the highest amounts of solar radiation.

Another distortion in the above data is that it is not adjusted for capacity and reliability. Coal, nuclear, and natural gas run 24/7/365, whereby solar thermal runs 8/7/365 at best.

In California, many of the large natural gas power plants are located along the coast and have historically used ocean water for cooling (generally not available for domestic water use). California is now forcing such power plants to be air cooled to protect millions of fish larvae in the sea water. But when it comes to protectiong billions of insects in the desert from being fried by solar panels that is ignored.

The Manduca Project at the University of Arizona estimates there are 750 insects per square foot of land area or 130 billion insects for the 4,000 acre Ivanpah Solar Thermal Power Plant in California. Source: http://insected.arizona.edu/manduca/ins_many.html

Water used by most power plants is not taken away from water used for human use. Power plants don't buy water from government water agencies to cool power plants. And water used for fracking and oil extraction is often deep water deposits left over from ice age that is too deep to drill for human use.

Sorry but have to laugh at this. For several reasons. The choice of comparing solar to Geothermal instead of coal or nuclear is misleading. Statistically speaking of course. The fact that there are numerous air cooled power plants in the American southwest makes your assertion that 100 oF makes such impossible. Nope. Just a bit harder. Power plants lose about 5% efficiency at 110 oF. Solar thermal plant in Arizona now runs about 6 hours past sunset because of storage. That and MWH battery storage in the near future will make this intermittent energy point moot.

Last but not least, the amount of land used in the 54,000 square mile Mojave desert for the solar plant is about 0.011%. So I think the insect world can handle the local Insectocaust.

I am not comparing solar to geothermal. I am comparing water usage in the same way the misleading chart did in the article.

It is not the solar plant but the solar panels that lose efficiency at high temperatures.

The point about insects vs fish larvae is fish are pretty and insects ugly so environmentalists and EIR's have an apparent double standard about the impacts on them. See "Killing Wildlife in the Name of Climate Change (Part 1 - The Double Standard) by Robert Bryce, MasterResource.org, Mar. 19 2014.

I guess you haven't heard that the largest solar plant in the world - Ivanpah - after being open only one month can not generate enough power without increasing the amount of natural gas boost to heating boilers from 1 hour to 5 hours per day adding 92,000 tons of Greenhouse Gases to the atmosphere? That is the same GHG's as 16,500 cars. Not exactly clean power.